SCOTUS Didn’t Ban Teaching About Islam

Q:Did the Supreme Court rule that public schools cannot teach students about Islam?

A:No. That false claim was spread by a network of fake news websites.

FULL QUESTION

Did the Supreme Court just shut down the teaching of Islam in our schools? Did Judge Gorsuch cast the deciding vote?

FULL ANSWER

No, the Supreme Court hasn’t decided that students can’t be taught about Islam in public schools. On April 11, fake news websites began publishing a bogus story that said “[t]he court ruled 5-4, with Justice Gorsuch casting the tie-breaker, that the only Islam taught to our children in public schools will be the history of Radical Islam and what they can do to help stop it.”

It alleged that newly installed Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote the majority opinion, and then provided a faux excerpt that was filled with errors: “We should [sic] be teaching any religions in this country besides standard Judeo-Chritianity [sic], as our founders wanted, and we certainly shouldn’t be filling the children with lies about Islam being a ‘religion of peace’ when they see the carnage on the news almost every day.”

Suspicious Facebook users have rightly flagged the bogus story as potentially fake, using the social media site’s improved tools for reporting a hoax.

Gorsuch hasn’t yet authored an opinion for the court. He was confirmed by the Senate on April 7 and was sworn in on April 10. He didn’t hear his first cases as a member of the court until April 17, nearly one week after the fake news story began circulating. And the court’s hearings list for the session beginning April 17 doesn’t include any cases dealing with Islam being taught in public schools.

The Resistance, as we’ve written before, admits to pushing fake news on its website. A disclaimer on its “about us” page says: “The Resistance may include information from sources that may or may not be reliable and facts that don’t necessarily exist. All articles should be considered satirical and any and all quotes attributed to actual people complete and total baloney. Pictures that represent actual people should be considered altered and not in any way real.”

At the time, Associate Justice Tom Clark wrote in his majority opinion: “It might well be said that one’s education is not complete without a study of comparative religion or the history of religion and its relationship to the advancement of civilization. It certainly may be said that the Bible is worthy of study for its literary and historic qualities. Nothing we have said here indicates that such study of the Bible or of religion, when presented objectively as part of a secular program of education, may not be effected consistently with the First Amendment.”

The court has not voted to change that.

Editor’s note: FactCheck.org is one of several organizations working with Facebook to help identify and label viral fake news stories flagged by readers on the social media network.